Lib at Large: Despite her ordeal in the Indian sex trade, Branson teacher vows to return

Natasha Singh is photographed at The Branson School in Ross, Calif. on Friday, Feb. 7, 2014. Singh, who is a teacher at the private school, was deported from India after doing research on sex trafficking and official corruption in the Indian sex trade. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

NATASHA SINGH, a Branson School teacher who was thrown out of India last summer for investigating the country's sex trade, has every intention of going back to continue her research this year, but she has been warned to be wary of police and government officials she has accused of "literally and figuratively being in bed with the sex industry."

The 40-year-old Singh has gone from being an unknown high school English and gender studies teacher to a new role as a high-profile speaker and activist on the issue of sexual exploitation and corruption in India. This has come about since a story in the Marin Independent Journal in November went viral, with some 68,000 page views over the past three months.

"On some level it's fantastic that people are reading my story," she said. "And on another level it's a little scary if they're reading it in India because I have no idea what that means. People I know who are there are saying be very careful if you come back. I'm hoping it will all be fine, but if it isn't, that's something I'll have to deal with at the time."

After reading the IJ story, Oscar winning filmmaker Jeffrey Brown got in touch with Singh to join forces with her in creating a movement to educate young people about sex trafficking. Brown, who lives in Mill Valley, is the director of a new feature film, "Sold," an adaptation of a National Book Award-nominated youth novel by Patricia McCormick. The movie, starring David Arquette and the X Files' Gillian Anderson, will have its world premiere March 7 and 9 at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose and will be in theaters this summer. An unfinished cut has been shown at Sir Francis Drake High School, where "Sold" was this year's required reading, and Brown plans to screen it for Singh's class at Branson in late March.

He believes Singh could easily have been hurt or killed while investigating the red light districts in India last summer for a book she's writing on about sex trafficking.

"I'm glad she's alive," he said. "What Natasha did was very brave, and she's fortunate to have gotten out without getting in more trouble. It's dangerous.There's lot of corruption around this issue because there's a lot of money at stake. Slavery as an illegal crime is estimated to generate $32 billion a year."

On Feb. 24 in the San Anselmo Town Hall council chambers, Singh will discuss her ordeal in a talk titled "Seeing Red: Voices from the Red Light Districts in India."

On her next trip, assuming she can get another visa, Singh, who is of Indian descent, will be careful to avoid the city of Siliguri in West Bengal, the so-called "Chicken Neck of India" because of its porous border with Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, a corridor for illicit trafficking of all kinds, including sex slaves.

It was there, while visiting brothels and interviewing sex workers with the help of an Indian non-governmental rescue organization (NGO), that she uncovered a sex scandal involving a 13-year-old girl from a middle class family who was gang raped after a trusted woman neighbor she thought of as "an auntie figure" lured her to a hotel room on the pretense of a shopping excursion.

"The men who raped her videotaped it, telling her if she said anything, they would post it on the Internet if she didn't comply with their demands," Singh said. "In a country like India, where something like that can mean life or death, I don't think she had much choice. So for two years she was forced to service countless men. And those men included police and government officials."

Coincidentally, Brown's film, based on a true story, follows a 13-year-old girl on a harrowing journey from a peaceful rural village in Nepal to the filthy brothels of Kolkata, India.

"This is a youth issue," he said. "The average global age of a trafficked girl is 13."

Before she could do anything about what she'd discovered in West Bengal, Singh was detained by police, who confiscated her passport, berated her for her activities and slapped her with a "Quit India" order. Darjeeling Superintendent of Police Kunal Agarwal accused her of paying a jailhouse visit to an agent of Inter-Services Intelligence, commonly known in India as ISI, the premiere intelligence agency of the rival Pakistani government, their equivalent of our CIA.

In a story in India's Kalimpong News, he said she was deported for violating her visa by working with an NGO and visiting an accused spy in jail, charges she vehemently denies.

"She was accused of being a terrorist because she discovered the corruption," Brown said. "If she goes back, she has to go in with NGOs. And she'll need some serious protection from some political figures as well. We'll have to find someone in the Indian government to clear her name."

Frightened, and seeing only more trouble if she fought her deportation, Singh, a Canadian citizen living in Oakland, boarded the first flight she could get back to America. And for good reason.

"The women who rescue girls and are in the trenches on this issue are frequently killed, or acid is thrown on them, or their children are kidnapped," Brown said. "The girls who are rescued are taken to safe harbors, but sometimes those safe harbors are found out and the gangs come and take the girls back."

Now that she's had time to reflect on what happened, Singh hopes she has the courage to be less intimidated if anything like this happens again when she returns.

"By the time things were coming to a head, the only thing coursing through my brain was to get out of India," she recalled. "And that's what people I was staying with were saying to me: 'Get out because you don't know what they'll do to you.' Whereas now, I wonder what would have happened if I had demanded more accountability? I wonder what would have happened if I had refused to go? There was no just cause for why I was deported or treated the way I was treated. So I'd like to believe that's something I will do differently."

Through her sources in India, she has heard that the young girl who was forced into prostitution is now out of sex slavery and is enrolled in a religious school.

"She isn't getting any counseling, but from what I can gather she's trying to get on with her life," she said.

But India is so rife with corruption that the men who raped and enslaved her have gotten off scot-free.

"The police involved have been reinstated," she said. "There were no convictions, no one lost a job. Essentially, nothing happened. It's business as usual."

On her next trip, Singh plans to work in Sonagachi, the largest red light district in Calcutta with hundreds of brothels and thousands of sex workers.

"My plan is to live there for one or two months and really spend a lot more time interviewing girls and women," she said.

This time, though, she's expanding her scope to encompass the "Johns," the men who spend money on prostitutes in India, a business that goes back to the Kama Sutra, written between 200 and 400 BC.

"It's almost as though, globally, our culture normalizes men purchasing girls and women for sex," she noted. "We tend to forget that there wouldn't be such a supply if there wasn't such a huge demand. I want to understand why men, Indian men in particular, buy women when they know their back stories, that they're often not there by choice. I've done a lot of research about Western sex tourists who go to other countries and what they have to say about the matter. But I don't know what Indian men have to say."

She has faith that education can lead to enlightenment and change, even in a country where, Singh says, the newspapers routinely chronicle brutal acts of violence against women and print daily lists of the latest gang rapes.

"I'd like to think that if we start educating men about the choices they make, we can hopefully create a culture in which people feel really responsible for one another," she said. "Oftentimes the people who run rehabilitation shelters in India are dealing with girls in serious pain that results from their experience in the sex trade. And I don't know how present the men are to those stories. And I don't know how much they care. And I want to know."